An Alaskan journalist's perspective on local and national issues

Posts tagged ‘Anti-Choice’

In fact, it’s just getting started. The really ugly thing is that women in this country don’t seem to realize that while it is being fought on some fronts, other fronts have them losing ground with incredible speed. It is something that few women are realizing, and they need to start focusing on. The worst part is that it is everywhere. Even my home state of Alaska is taking some hits.

The stuff that is so bat-s*it crazy, like the law forcing women to get a trans-vaginal ultrasound before an abortion, those were all just window dressing. It was stuff so insane, that women’s groups would immediately attack with all haste, failing to see where they were losing ground. The irony is that most of this has been on the state level.

Take the issue of abortion. The number of restrictions to abortion skyrocketed in 2011. The number of supportive and neutral states in this battle has rapidly been shrinking. From between 2000 to 2011, it is almost staggering how many states that were in the middle suddenly jumped ship over to being hostile to women getting an abortion.

Next, there is the battle against birth control. In some places, there are efforts to deny women access to it altogether. In Arizona, there is a new bill that would allow prospective employers the ability to sniff through a woman’s personal life. Effectively, a company could ask their women future employees for proof of the medical prescriptions to show that they are using contraception for non-sexual purposes, like treating ovarian cysts. It’s an invasion of privacy, and all because these group can also deny coverage of contraceptives for “religious reasons.” The worst reasoning of all time, and our government has given it to them on a silver platter. Seems that the First Amendment never meant much to anybody.

Religion has had a very big stake in this game. The Conferance of Catholic Bishops has made a committment to redouble their efforts to stop women from having access to birth control. They call it, “religious freedom.” The freedom to do what? Force your dogma on other women? Seems to be a good case for it.

A rather frightening turn of events is that Republicans have also suddenly about-faced on legislation that was never and issue, until the LGBT community got involved. The Violence Against Women Act, something that has never been a partisan issue before now, is under attack from the conservative right. In the Senate, there is dwindling support, and why? Because it was up to extend the benefits of it to LGBT, Native, and other minority groups. This really kind of kills the argument that Republicans are for everyman (or woman). They are only for their constitutency, and of course, you have to be straight, and not use birth control.

The sad fact is that while women in this country are fighting, they are playing purely defense. The right wing of this country has always been good at pushing the goal line so far to the right that no progress can truly get done. And because the liberal crowd will absolutely not fight, for fear of being called “partisan,” women in this country are losing ground.

Ladies, it is time for you to accept that you can no longer just play defense. The bills like the one for trans-vaginal ultrasound, or ones in Kansas and Utah, they are just fronts. While people are fighting against those, the real hits to women’s rights are everywhere.

There has got to be some liberal action taken here. It is time to take the offensive. People will call us partisan, but the fact is, we literally can’t do anything else now. It is way past the point of no return. This is the point of no sanity. It is insane how this has been allowed to go one, while anybody who says that we need to start being a little bit more proactive in a political countermeasure is called bad.

It’s not a bad thing to have an agenda. It’s not a bad thing to fight for it. Republicans have figured that out, and until the liberals realize that we are in a culture war, and are losing, fast, we are eventually going to see all progress destroyed, and all because these people don’t want to stand up for what is right.

It isn’t often that one can point to something that the government of America has done and talk about how it is beyond foul. In the world of right-wing insanity, this has got to be a step up. It really doesn’t get much better than this. In Arizona, there has been a new law that has been passed that say a doctor can lie to a patient about their own child.

You see, despite all the anti-choice propaganda, a lot of these women are having abortion for the reason of sparing a child from having to live a life that would be nothing but suffering. Whenever it is found that children have birth defects, the mother gets to have the option to abort, and save both herself suffering, and the fetus’ suffering.

It is called the “Wrongful Birth” law. It effectively allows a doctor to withhold information about a woman’s fetus if birth defects are found, in the interest of preventing her to have an abortion. This even includes if the defects are so serious that they could kill the mother. This law allows doctors to completely ignore the Hippocratic Oath.

This is going to be a short and sweet post. Arizona law-makers, thank you for sending a “Screw You” message to women everywhere, along with to decency. The levels of selfish conceit here I are blinding. It cannot be argued that this is a law that is attacking women. They will dress it up as protecting babies, but it is entirely done to take the choices away from women.

And this leads to the ultimate truth about the “pro-life” movement. For the most part, it isn’t “pro-life.” If they are against capital punishment, and the wars, then one can accept that they are pro-life. However, for the most part, it is simply anti-choice. They are against the fact that women in this country are able to choose for themselves how to conduct their lives. Since the Republican base has now transformed almost entirely into middle-aged to elderly white men, then it makes a lot more sense why this is so. These people have always been against women.

However, as with all the laws that these conservatives insane-asylum rejects have put out, it ignores the true consequences of its reach. Prenatal care is for more than just the problems, like birth defects. It exists to help find out if there are life-threatening complications, such as ectopic pregnancy, which can kill a mother if she doesn’t abort.

But given other bills, like the ones that say that there should be no abortion even in the instance to save the mother’s life, it is no surprise the Republicans went down this road. Women, you have to take action. Get as many as you can, and tell them all – do NOT support a Republican vote. Even if you are a conservative, these people are beyond that. They have gone into the realm of your typical insane asylum, and it needs to stop.

If one travels the corridors and hallways of UAA and happens to come upon this little sign, then you’ll get to see one of the most profound exercises in stupidity that has ever been done. There is a candlelight vigil that is going down soon (or could have happened. Either way, this needs to be talked about) with the group UAA Students for Life. These are basically anti-choice (pro-life) activists who are doing this vigil for Roe v. Wade.

For real, they are actually having an candlelight vigil to say this is something that people should be mourning. Let’s examine that fact, because if one thinks about it, not only is this horrible, but it says something really bad about the people involved.

Roe v. Wade was an act that gave a woman the right to her own body. The holding in this case was a law in Texas that made it a crime for a woman to get assistance when getting an abortion, and that this was a violation of her due process rights. The courts agreed, and from that day on, women got to have the rights to their own bodies. It was a fantastic day for women, and for pro-women activists. However, for another group of people, that isn’t the case.

From the moment it passed, the opposition took to the streets. The irony of modern times is that the more options, pharmaceutically, that exist ot prevent women from getting abortions, the louder the opposition becomes. But why is this? Well, the simple argument is that they believe that life begins at conception. A million and a half brilliant minds have already torn that argument to pieces, so we won’t go into that here.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter. This is like gay marriage – it is something that politicians have no right or good reason to be getting involved in. A lot of Ron Paulites say, “let the states decide!” No, wrong! This is something that either America has to be totally for or totally against. We cannot have the double-standard in this country that we do. And you see it all the time.

An interesting thought about these anti-choice people is that they want to protect the unborn, but the moment you are in the world, they don’t want to hear about you. No health care, no Head Start, no food stamps, no school lunch. Nothing. They don’t care about you until you reach military age. When they can send you overseas to die in pointless wars, that’s when these anti-choice people like to hear about you. But other than that, nothing! Absolutely nothing.

But getting back to the UAA Students for Life vigil, let me ask you something – do you not want women to have rights over their own bodies? Surely that’s the case. You must truly believe that women’s interests should be subjugated by the state. And since it is almost universally white conservatives who take this view, I find it surprising that you take this standpoint, especially considering that you all seem to want this “small government.” Yeah, small enough to watch over each woman and make sure her pregnancy goes to term.

They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like ’em.

And that’s the simple truth. They dont’ like women. Or at the very least, they don’t like the fact that they can choose what to do with their own bodies. And so, giving them the right to do so is worthy of a candlelight vigil.